Don't train your staff. Coach them.

You know the pattern. You send someone to training. They earn the certification. Then they update their resume and leave for a better offer, taking your training budget out the front door with them.

It's maddening. So here's a proposal: stop leaning on traditional training, and develop your people through coaching instead.

(The required disclaimer: I'm not saying training is bad. That would be nonsense. It's one tool among many, and no single method fits everyone, which is rather the point.)

What people want from work

Inc. magazine once listed the things employees want most. The top four were purpose, goals, responsibility, and autonomy.

None of those are possible when people feel they have no say in their careers and no direction. Add an organization that's reluctant to trust them with more, and you can see why they walk.

Development is how you fix that. Build people's skills properly and you'll have the confidence to hand them more responsibility and more autonomy. Tie their work to the organization's goals and they have a purpose.

Coach, don't train

Think about the difference between high school and college. High school force-feeds you facts and expects them recited back. College expects you to learn concepts and apply them. The second works better, because the student has to work out how and why the material matters.

The same holds at work. Send someone to a class and expect an expert to come back, and you'll be disappointed. They will forget most of what they heard.

That's how you get the Paper Tiger: the candidate with a wall of certifications and no practical experience. Real expertise takes both.

What coaching looks like

Coaching means you're involved at every step.

Build a development plan with the employee, not for them. Tie it to the organization's goals and to their own. Put dates on every objective, because goals without dates don't get met, and a missed goal is as demoralizing as having none.

Then meet regularly. Review what's been accomplished and what's been hard, and praise steady progress over big wins.

Along the way, teach the habits that make people hungry to improve:

• Flexibility. Knowing what to do when things aren't exactly as the procedure describes.
• Creative thinking. Brainstorming, and arguing about problems in the open.
• Continuous improvement. There is no perfect state, only the next better one.
• Data-driven decisions. You don't need perfect information, just enough to choose between two or three options.
• Seeking out discomfort. I made the case for this in Pain is good.

Six ways to build skills without a classroom

• Shadowing. Pair them with a senior colleague who explains how they do the job and why.
• Documentation. Have them write the knowledge articles and procedures. They learn by writing, the organization gets better documentation, and peer review keeps it accurate.
• Self-study. Online courses, product documentation, and videos are good for filling specific gaps.
• Peer organizations. Connect them with someone doing the same job somewhere else, with different tools and processes.
• Become the trainer. Ask them to teach the topic to the team. Nothing motivates learning like having to explain it.
• The unknown road. When someone discovers an interest you didn't plan for, give them room to explore it. It may change their direction, but they're more likely to pursue it with you than elsewhere.

Retire train-and-pray

None of this works as a standard package. You have to adapt to each person and build a plan that shows them how to get better at the job they have and ready for the one they want.

Do that, and they're far more likely to stay engaged, stay invested, and stay.

A longer version of this article first appeared on LinkedIn in 2016. Read the original there.